THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Cognizant announced on October 30 an OpenAI Frontier Capability Group of more than 25,000 professionals dedicated to delivering OpenAI products, including Codex and ChatGPT.
  • The initial focus areas are software engineering with Codex, application modernization with an OpenAI-powered tool, and agentic customer operations.
  • The company says more than 21,000 employees have earned over 40,000 OpenAI training badges; it does not disclose financial terms or revenue targets.

Cognizant, the New Jersey-based IT services company, said on October 30 that it has created an OpenAI Frontier Capability Group bringing together more than 25,000 professionals assigned to delivering OpenAI products, including Codex and ChatGPT, to enterprise clients. The stated aim is to help companies move OpenAI models out of pilots and into software development, customer service and day-to-day operations.

Three initial priorities

According to the announcement, the group will start with three areas. The first is software engineering built around Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, which Cognizant says its engineers use to write, test and ship code. The second is application modernization through Cognizant Application Modernizer, an in-house tool running on OpenAI models that is meant to cover the path from reverse engineering old mainframe code to producing cloud-native code, with engineers reviewing every significant decision. Cognizant says it has modernized mainframe systems for more than 500 clients. The third is agentic customer operations in sales, service and support, which the company says it has first tested on its own sales and customer success teams.

As an example, Cognizant cites an OpenAI-powered assistant it co-built for an unnamed global biopharmaceutical company. The firm says the tool has handled more than 5 million conversations and reduced content creation time by 60%; these figures have not been independently verified.

Training and certification

Cognizant reports that more than 21,000 employees have collected over 40,000 OpenAI badges, each tied to a learning track, and that Codex hackathons in India and the Americas drew more than 12,000 participants. It is also developing two credentials, Frontier Certified Engineers and Frontier Business Operators, which it says will be issued directly by frontier model companies. The company describes itself as one of a small number of Advanced partners in the OpenAI Partner Network.

Chief executive Ravi Kumar S framed the move as a response to a shift in who builds enterprise systems, while OpenAI chief revenue officer Dali Rajic said the practice should help more businesses get value from AI.

What remains unclear

The announcement does not say whether the 25,000 people are new hires or existing staff reassigned, nor does it give any revenue target or financial terms with OpenAI.